The Proposed Prophecies

The next morning, Liv got up early and worked on her homework as she’d skipped it the night before. But it was hard to focus, especially as Ashley was on her mind and she had been unable to sleep last night. Life was so unpredictable and unfair. She exhaled and placed her head in her hands as she sat at her desk in front of her laptop. Her eyes were closing and her arms shaking from the weight of her head and the lack of energy. The sudden sound of her phone made her jump. It was Becky calling through Skype. Liv hesitated at first but picked up anyhow.

“Why didn’t you tell me about your boyfriend? Do I have to find out everything from Tiffany’s Facebook page? If she didn’t post about every step of her life I would never even knew you have a boyfriend. By the way, he is cute!” Becky sounded very excited.

“My what?” Liv said and suddenly remembered Evan. He had called her last night and she had hung up on him and texted him instead, saying that she would call him later but she never did. Liv thought that Becky must have been referring to the picture of her and Evan taken by John at Tiffany’s party. The picture itself didn’t even suggested that Evan was her boyfriend but Liv thought that Becky surely had a sixth sense when it came to human relations shown on social media. Evan stood next to her. He wasn’t even smiling in the picture. Liv thought he looked like he didn’t even want to be in that photo in the first place.

“So?” Becky still waited for an explanation. Liv apologized and explained the situation with Ashley which seemed to satisfy her. But each word she said was becoming slower and heavier.

“I am sorry Becky but I am about to fall asleep. I haven’t slept all night.” Without waiting for a response or goodbye, she hung up and threw herself into her bed. She tried to move her head away from the pillow, it was harder to breathe because the fluffy pillow sucked her face all the way in. All she managed was to move it to the left when she spotted the FedEx box next to her nightstand which she hadn’t opened yet. She had completely forgotten about it. She pulled it closer to her bed with her remaining energy as she hung off the bed. She opened it and grabbed the first thing on the top. It looked like a used diary. It had an old light brown paper back cover and despite her tiredness she still managed to open it; her curiosity gave her the extra push.

The handwriting was clean and even, it almost appeared as if it was painted instead of written. Words perfectly followed each other, letter after letter as if they somehow danced together. First she thought it was her grandmother’s diary, but then as she read the first page it appeared like it was a man’s point of view. He was writing about a woman who seemed to interest him, but who he suspected of taking advantage of him.

“Human kind means nothing to her, she hates every single one of them, except me. I don’t even know what is so special about me to make this beautiful creature like me so much. Often, I think that she is a part of the Proposal project only because she wants to stay around me. It somehow feels like it is the only thing that keeps us together. Planning the death of billions of people is part of our relationship, if I can even call it as such between us.

Years are going by and the destruction of human kind is coming. I am not even sure if I want to be alive to see that. One after another; children, old people and young people will all die if their family name is not on the list. I am trying to pretend that it doesn’t bother me, but I am lying to myself. I am not as careless as I was ten years ago. I feel as if something is changing. Perhaps I am having second thoughts or maybe I am regretting the pact made with the devil or in this case with the beautiful creature that is hiding the devil itself inside her soul, if she even has such a thing. She manipulated me with her beauty and soft touches and I am seeing it now. She wanted me to get close to Axel and then to slowly move him out of her way so that the path is clear for her to be next in line to be a commander. She made me believe that she was a better fit for commander and I believed her. It was hard not to. I was only a fifteen-year-old teenager when I met her and she was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.

Our first meeting was on the day I jumped into Sergeant Hovey’s nervous breakdown speech and enabled the explanation for each part of the Proposal to the Alters. She looked like she was poisoned by the whole idea and she decided to step up her game later on that night when she showed up at my room in the military base. This was a game in which she chose me to be the puppet she could manipulate. She knew that Axel liked me and would trust me.

All I wanted was to be with her but now I see she was just using me. She suggested to me that she wanted me to kill Axel so she could be the commander of the Alters, but I like Axel. After so many years spent in his presence and working towards the reestablishment and preparation I found a father figure in him. How was I supposed to kill him? I can’t and she knows it. She also knows that I am about to switch sides and she doesn’t like it at all.”

He often called her the beautiful creature. Liv wasn’t really sure if he meant her grandmother, since there was no name mentioned, but then she wasn’t even sure if it was her grandfather’s diary on the first place. The diary appeared to be used as a diary but the fact that it mentioned the destruction of human kind and some kind of aliens named Alters, made her think that it was somehow made up, one of the stories perhaps that he used to write, like Amy had mentioned. Even so, the fact that he mentioned something called the Proposal was still strange to her. She remembered Jake and Eve’s conversation in the parking lot. It would be more than impossible that a story dated from 1955 would somehow be tied to Jake and Eve, she thought.

Her eyes were slowly closing. No matter how much she wanted to go through the box, her dreams were overtaking her.

The sound of a thunder made her jump and she realized, suddenly, that she was not in Amy’s house any longer. She didn’t have the diary nearby. She looked at her hands and touched her white plain shirt. It was soaked from the rain; the short black denim shorts were the same exact ones she was wearing that morning. Despite the rain she did not feel the wetness on her skin or the wet clothes pressed to her body. “It is a dream,” she thought out loud. Everything appeared so real but her body felt senseless. “This must be a dream.”

The occasional flash of lightning was the only light clearing out the vision of the dark place. Strong waves of the ocean were reaching a dangerous height as the storm forced them to grow and they swung the parked ships from sides to sides and kept hitting the board walks of the harbor as if they wanted to crash the man made path into small pieces. Her bare feet walked on top of the wooden boards that led to the last ship which appeared to be at the very end of the harbor. For some reason, the waves left a clear path on which she walked. She wasn’t sure what was happening or where she was. It looked like a harbor, but one she had never been to before.

As she walked closer to the ship, Liv felt fearful, despite knowing that this was a nightmare and she could not be harmed. The fear was not from the storm but from the closeness of the unknown: she didn’t know why she was there at the harbor or what would be the outcome of the storm. She could have chosen to walk the opposite way but she felt as if she knew was supposed to walk to that particular ship. A man was standing next to the ship but the rain and the darkness was too hard to ignore. Suddenly, lightning bolt of lightning lit up the ship.

“Kill him or he will kill you,” said the voice of Eve suddenly appearing and whispering into her ear as Liv looked at the colossal ship in the harbor. She knew who the man was standing next to the ship. “Evan” Suddenly her hand was holding something she hadn’t felt before. It was a gun. Around her, a strong and powerful downpour swept through the harbor. She found herself standing in front of Evan, aiming the gun at him and she faced a gun aimed at her. Evan’s face appeared disappointed, possibly even angry. They aimed the gun at each other while the thunder escalated and flashes of lightning brightened up the abandoned harbor.

“This is all your fault,” he said.

He unlocked the safety on his gun.

Her breathing became faster, louder. Suddenly this felt more real than ever. She didn’t want to shoot Evan, she loved him and could not imagine what she could have done to him to make him hate her. He didn’t explain what he meant by this all being her fault and it made her feel more desperate, somehow more vulnerable.

“Help me!” She turned around as a little girl with bleeding eyes grabbed Liv’s attention. Liv’s eyes opened wide. The little girl appeared ill. Her skin was pale white, only the blue vessels covering her face, hands and legs gave color to her appearance. Her yellow dress was soaked wet and her long brown hair pressed onto the sides of her face. She came out of nowhere, taking Liv’s attention off Evan and the fact he was still aiming his gun at her. “You need to help me,” she cried out, reaching out to grab on to Liv’s soaked shirt. She placed her gun down as the child become demanding of her attention. “Help me… help me… help me…” Liv moved backwards, nearly tripping over a doll which she thought must have belonged to the girl who suddenly screamed with a high pitch tone. Liv’s could feel tears pricking her eyes. She didn’t know how to help and she felt fearful.

“You can’t avoid the prophecies set for you and your kind.” Eve appeared next to Liv again. “Leave me alone” Liv yelled as she moved backwards and fired the gun three times on Eve who seemed not to be bothered by the bullets running through her body. As if she wasn’t even human.

Suddenly Liv stopped. She felt blood dripping through her chest, and turned around and saw the smoke coming from Evan’s gun. “I told you to kill him or he will kill you,” Eve whispered.

****

Liv jumped up from her nightmare and looked at the clock on her phone. She had slept for four hours but it felt like only a few minutes. She still felt tired but she leapt up as she only had ten minutes to get ready and get to her class at 12. Her phone showed three missed calls from Tiffany, one from Carmen and a text message from Evan. “Is everything OK?” it read. She remembered his angry look in the nightmare. “Just a silly dream” she said out loud and dialed Evan’s phone number.

“Liv, I was worried about you.” His voice sounded concerned and real, unlike the Evan from the dream. Liv explained the situation with Ashley and Evan was more than understanding. She felt lucky to have such a guy in her life. He was always so patient and polite. Sometimes his words and the way he spoke made him seem as if he was much older than her. There was a gentleman quality to him that Liv didn’t see in guys her age. He always opened the door on the car for her, always let her talk and never interrupted. He wasn’t even on social media. As a matter of fact, the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she had never even seen him play with his phone like most guys.

She smiled a little and when was about to get up from her bed when she noticed the diary laying on the floor. She though it must have fallen down once she fell asleep. She picked it up and stared at it for a second. The soft brown paper cover looked so old but well preserved. Just touching it reminded her that inside were the words of a man she had never met before. She looked over at the Fed Ex box next to her bed, sitting on the dark marble floor and opened it again despite the fact that she had to leave for her class very shortly. Old pictures of Jason from when he was young, were instantly noticeable. There were at least twenty of them and they were mostly taken with some men that looked like they were in the army. He looked like Christopher, slightly. Muscular, shaved head and big eyes, with a mean and serious look in most of the photos and a cigarette constantly stuck to his mouth. She grabbed one of the pictures that caught her attention. He was standing next to a smaller military airplane and dressed in a pilot suit with goggles on his head. He had a cigarette in his mouth and his arm across a woman with dark long hair who was wearing a light summer dress. The photo was grey and hard to see as they were standing further away but she thought it must have been the grandmother who had died from cancer. She wondered if he was writing about her, if she was the beautiful creature he mentioned. The back of the photo was dated 1956, which was a year after he had written the diary. She placed the photo back and saw more brown paperback notebooks. She placed her hand on top of one and smiled a little; she imagined there would be more in this diary about the strange love story and that it would be tied up with talking about the destruction of the world.

She closed the box and her phone suddenly rang and made her jump a little. This time it was Carmen. “Are you coming to school?” Carmen asked and Liv realized that she was already late. “I am coming” she replied and hung up, grabbed her books and looked at the diary. She hesitated, wondering if she should take it with her, then grabbed it anyway and rushed out of the room, running towards the front door.

“Watch out, my dear. Don’t break your precious head on your way out” Eve said with a calm voice. Liv turned around and spotted Eve with Amy standing on the stairwell, both looking curious at Liv’s rushing. “Eve is leaving tonight. She’s going back to New York. She came to say goodbye.” Amy said.

“Oh. I see. Have a safe trip back… I have to go… I am late for my class,” Liv said, barely stopping to breathe as she ran. She had never know that Eve was living in New York but she was glad she was returning. She felt a certain anger at seeing Eve standing there. Eve could have an affair with Jake and there she was, standing and talking to Amy as if nothing was going on. Liv wondered if Eve knew about Ashley and if she would even care what Ashley was going through, or if she just came here for Jake and pretended to be a friend to Amy.

As Liv parked her car at school she kept thinking about how professor Harper might throw her out of the class for being late. His sense of tolerance wasn’t exactly his strength. She ran the whole way from the parking lot into the building and stopped once she reached room 127. She realized she was carrying her grandfather’s diary instead of the book used for the class. She knew she should open the door and join the class but somehow she felt a certain desire to finish reading it. She looked through the small narrow glass on the door into the classroom and saw her classmates taking notes. Carmen was sitting at her usual seat in the back. She glanced at the diary and thought she could skip the class and read it instead, just today, so long as she never skipped school again..

She smiled and felt like a little child that had just stolen a candy and needed to run. The hallway of the school was empty and the only sound that could be heard was the echo of her running. She ran through the glass entry door of the campus building and back to her car. She hesitated, wondering if she should go back to Amy’s house. She didn’t want to see Eve again, nor to explain why she was home so early and had not gone to class. She remained in her car instead and opened the diary again.

The next few pages were mostly spent describing who the Alters were. He described them as a civilization who was in charge of the list of specific requirements people had to meet in order to become the chosen ones. Liv remembered the conversation between Jake and Eve, where they had mentioned the chosen ones and thought about how much of a coincidence this was becoming. It was strange and somehow disturbing but at the same time fascinating. Her brain was like a sponge that sucked in each entry. The pages were so old they felt as though they were about to fall apart each time she turned a page.

He mentioned teams of people and Alters that worked on choosing the best possible families for the restoration and for the subsequent reestablishment of society.

"They gave me a new list of names at the beginning of the month, families, specifically, and their addresses. My job is still the same, to spy and conduct research on these people and to decide if their family name will be crossed from the list or if they make it into the “in consideration” file. From there they would be handled by the government and Alters who decide if they would move forward and become the chosen ones.

There are thousands of Alters and military people in my group and that is only in the U.S. There are thousands more in Europe, Asia, and all other continents, all with the same job: to search for the chosen ones, those that would be taken into the bunkers as per the proposal and that will survive the six step destruction process of human kind.”

The writing in this diary was strange. It didn’t contain the love story she had been expecting. She wondered how far these stories went and if there was something true about them. She spotted some students walking out of the building and remembered she should have gone to class instead. That was the whole reason she had moved to Miami, to finish school, but somehow she had ended up being caught up with these stories in a diary that she wasn’t even sure was her grandfather’s. She would have asked Amy before she went to school but Eve was there staring like an eagle at it’s prey, with her cold blue eyes. Suddenly she realized the writer of the diary described the beautiful creature as having cold blue eyes too. She suddenly laughed. “Yeah right,” she said out loud. For a second she thought it was possible that Eve was the alien female described in his diary.

Her phone lit up as it was laying in the passenger’s seat and showed a text message from Carmen. “Where are you?” Liv wanted to respond but she decided to move another page in the diary instead as it was hard to explain, especially to Carmen. She would probably think Liv was crazy.

“I used to be excited to be part of the whole idea of the restoration of the world and to reestablish the life of human kind and that it didn’t matter if I was on Eve’s side. I still liked the idea ten years ago but now I am not so sure. It feels different. Now that I have spent many years spying on people to see their habits, personalities, their problems and their happiness, it is hard to cross these families off the list once they don’t meet the criteria. Any families that had any run in with the law, however small, had to be crossed off the list. Or families that had a mentally ill family member, or families without any higher education, families with significant health issues, even smokers. I would definitely not make it on to the list, that’s for sure. The list of criteria went on and on. I went through hundreds of thousands of names and so far I had only ten families that I was able to add into the in consideration file. Ten families! In the past ten years. It was such a joke! And such a shame and even then it was not a sure thing they would be the chosen ones once the government and the Alters had also gone through their records.

Axel says the number designed for the chosen ones is so limited that we cannot feel bad. We need to push through, no matter how hard it is, so that we can create a better life on earth. I guess he is right. He always knows what to say to calm me down. I don’t understand how I could have agreed ten years ago to secretly go against him to help her. I was truly under some kind of a spell of hers. But it is over. And I am going to tell her the second I see her. I know I can do it now. Now that I have met Clair. We only met a week ago. She is the complete opposite; so kind and forgiving. My heart races each time I look at her, each time I hear her soft voice.

She is one of the computer scientists working on a new technology to better assist us in researching people. She said there would soon be such technologies that would enable us to put less than half the effort into the research and will make everything a lot easier. She is smart, unlike me. I don’t even know how to turn on these commercial computers and I get a headache just by looking at them. But that’s her, beautiful, smart and kind Clair. When I spend time with her, I even start wondering about marriage and children. It is so crazy! I never thought I would ever consider having children or a wife one day. But now, as I look at Clair, the idea doesn’t feel as strange. Though I start to wonder if it would even be safe to have children. If I go through the requirements to become a chosen one I am sure I would never make it there which means my children would never make it there either and I don’t know how I would explain to my kids one day that they are not on the list.”

Liv knew Clair was the name of her grandmother but as far as she knew Clair never worked back then and she was a stay home mom and wife. But then no one ever said what she worked as before she met Jason. Liv closed the diary.

“The chosen ones?” she said out loud. What he was writing about felt unreal and left her feeling like she was stuck between real life and a dream. It was hard to decide if these were only stories or a secret she should have never known about.

Suddenly a door opened on the passenger’s side

“Is everything Ok? Why didn’t you come in? I saw you through the window.” Carmen’s voice made her jump. Liv grabbed her phone from the seat and let Carmen sit down next to her.

“I was just tired and also I started reading this diary. I think it belongs to my dead grandfather,” said Liv, deciding to skip the part about the chosen ones. She did not want to sound like a crazy person and she wasn’t sure what to think about what she had read yet.

“I think you should leave dead people and their diaries alone. Seriously, I would hunt you down if I knew you were reading my diary after I had died,” smiled Carmen. Liv laughed. It was the funniest thing she had heard in days. Cheering people up was Carmen’s special talent. She was always funny and relaxed.

“Go and see your boyfriend, rest a little and stop reading dead people’s thoughts.” Carmen looked at Liv with a serious expression. “Ok?”

Liv smiled and nodded her head but it was surely not an agreement she would be able to stick to for long.

“I have to go back to class now. I just wanted to see what had happened to you since I saw your car still here as I went to pick up my books from my car. See you tomorrow.” Carmen got out of the car and walked back to the school building.

Liv exhaled. She thought about what Carmen had said. Perhaps she should have paid a little more attention to Evan. She wiped her eyes and decided to put the diary away for now. She reached back to the back seat and grabbed the white bag that Amy had given her as a present a week ago and placed the diary into it. As she pulled out of the parking lot headed towards Evan’s apartment in downtown, she couldn’t help but glance at the white bag laying on the passenger’s seat, knowing that the diary inside held some unforgettable stories.